Need help with the Predictive Text settings, changes in settings make no difference?General

No matter what I check/uncheck, nothing makes a difference when I type, so I might not be understanding what these options are supposed to do. If anyone can elaborate that'd be great, otherwise it seems to be that I start typing, various suggestions show up and I can tap on one or keep typing to complete the word myself and hit space. The options here don't seem to have any effect.

And this is in Settings > Language & Input > Settings icon to the right of Samsung Keyboard > Predictive Text.

I have this same question/issue. I can't find any place these options are explained: not in the Samsung S3 user manual and not on the Verizon support site for this phone. No matter what options I change in this menu, for example disabling Word completion and Auto-substitution altogether, it doesn't affect what happens when you type - even after a phone reboot. Words still get completed and auto-substitution still occurs, etc. This is annoying. I'd like to tweak the way this works in order to minimize the quirks I don't like, without turning it off completely and losing the ability to swipe or have it auto-correct to add punctuation for me.

When I compose messages, I prefer to use a combination of T9 Trace (Samsung's version of Swype) and tap-to-enter. When the word I want to use is a long but common one, I like to swype it in. But if I need to enter a very short word or one that's an acronym or related to my job industry or whatever, I just tap it in. It's quicker/better that way since it's not likely to be in the dictionary anyway.

What I dislike about predictive text on the Samsung keyboard (g/f really hates this on her S3) is when you quickly tap in a word exactly as you want it to be and then hit space and continue on. . . and then you realize several words later that the predictive text feature put in something completely different and you have to go back and edit it. But I didn't want to turn predictive text off completely, because that totally kills T9 Trace and you lose the Auto-substitution function that turns cant into can't, etc., and I do like that.

I would prefer that the keyboard just showed you suggested word choices in the strip above the keyboard, without actually picking one for you and also showing it that way in the text entry field. That's what led me to trying to play with these predictive text settings in the first place.

Anyway, I played with these options some more.It seems like the "Spell correction" option on this menu was the key. With that ON, you still got Word completion and Auto-correction even when it seemed you shouldn't. (In hindsight it makes sense.) But with Spell correction OFF, the Word completion and Auto-correction settings were respected.

So I found a compromise I can live with for now:

I turned OFF Spell correction, turned OFF Word completion, and left Auto-substitution ON.

You would think that turning off Word completion would stop T9 Trace from working, but it doesn't. When you swype in a word, it sort of has to predict it and therefore completes it, and by its very nature that completed word is also spell correctly. So far so good. Now when I tap in a word, all I see is the exact letters I'm typing in, both in the text entry field and in blue in the predictive strip.

With Auto-substitution left ON, if you tap in one of the words listed in your substitution list, like shouldnt, it DOES still enter shouldn't for you, which I like. But you don't get any word suggestions in your predictive strip this way, so it won't catch a misspelled word, which isn't ideal. But when I'm tapping in a word it's often short or an acronym anyway and I'm paying more attention.

Also, if you type in any unrecognized word, it will still add it to your "My word list" even if you don't want it to, including the misspellings I just mentioned. I wish it would only add it if you clicked the blue copy of the word shown in the predictive strip and NOT when you just hit space. But I can periodically just delete the garbage words from my word list if they start cropping up by mistake when I'm swyping in longer words.

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I still don't know what some of these settings do, like "Recapture (Enable XT9 recommendations)" because it seems to make no difference to me whether it's on or off. But hopefully this helps anyone who's irked by some of the default predictive text settings of the Samsung Galaxy S3 keyboard like I was.

Seething.Sage

P.S. Yes, I know I can download diffferent keyboards from the Play Store, and that might be the best solution for me in the end. But some people reading this won't ever do that. I also need to know how all of the default/stock stuff works, since I'm my company's IT System Admin and I support our company cell phones by default and we'll be getting a few more of these in our environment soon.